Abstract

New Tools for Liquid Biopsies to Enable Precision Medicine

Steve Soper, Foundation Distinguished Professor; Director, Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine, Adjunct Professor, Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology, The University of Kansas

Liquid biopsies are generating great interest within the medical community due to the simplicity for securing important biomarkers to manage complex diseases, such as many of the cancer-related diseases. Liquid biopsy markers can facilitate the realization of Precision Medicine in terms of assisting in the discovery of new patient-specific therapies and stratifying patients to match them to appropriate therapies. We are developing a suite of novel microfluidic devices that can process whole blood directly and designed to efficiently search for a variety of disease-associated liquid biopsy markers from divergent subpopulations comprising the tumor microenvironment. The microfluidic devices can isolate the target with recovery >90% and sufficient purity (>80%) to enable downstream molecular analysis. In this presentation, I will discuss the development of a fluidic system for monitoring minimum residual disease (MRD) in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients following allosteric stem cell transplantation to detect signs of relapse without requiring a bone marrow biopsy. Specifically, the peripheral blood of patients were tracked longitudinally for signs of relapse using circulating leukemia cells with relapse detected nearly 2 months prior to the standard of care, which required a bone marrow aspirate and multi-parameter flow cytometry. In addition, the staging of patients with multiple myeloma will be discussed via affinity selection of circulating plasma cells using peripheral blood samples with FISH carried out on the circulating plasma cells.